1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for providing metadata of broadcast program via a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Television companies are frequently broadcasting commercial messages (CMs) for program promotion in order to increase reception of new and special programs. The audience ratings of the programs themselves can be investigated by means of an existing examination system; however, the effectiveness of such commercial messages leading to actual reception of the programs cannot be examined thereby. So, the examination of the effectiveness of the commercial messages on a case-by-case basis by means of a questionnaire survey or the like requires a very high cost. Thus, a new service such as expressing program preview information as metadata of a program, distributing the data via Internet and a broadcast wave, and utilizing it between a broadcasting receiving apparatus and a distribution server is considered to become more and more active in the future.
In recent years it is desired to realize a highly user-friendly service function taking advantage of the metadata of the program information as described above for satisfying service subscribers' needs, which are ever-increasingly advanced and diversified. For this purpose, high-quality metadata should be created, thus resulting in high costs and much time. However, in the present state of metadata providing services, the thinking is that “metadata should be available free of charge”, thus there is no system that can recover the cost for providing metadata.
As a technology for making metadata available, a technology for detecting an operation of a program being received conducted by a user and acquiring related information (metadata) from a server (program information DB) other than a server distributing the EPG (Electronic Program Guide) is described, for example, in JP-A 2005-175850 (KOKAI). The program information DB accumulates not only the program-related information contents themselves as information concerning any portion of a program, but also references such as a URL and URI for searching for related information on a predetermined information space such as the Internet, resource identification information, and keywords.
A TV receiver having a function for sending viewing information outside is also known (for example, refer to JP-A 2005-151148 (KOKAI). Since this receiver can send not only viewing information, but also operation information at the time of program timer-recording, the program timer-recording rate or the like can be analyzed from outside. In this Document, it is described to send analyzed data regularly to a server.
With a developing program timer-recording function in the broadcast receiver, it is desired to rapidly realize a service for providing metadata concerning program information. For example, no function of timer-recording a main broadcast program by means of one-click operation of a user in an early stage in which the EPG information of the main broadcast program to be promoted has not been distributed when receiving a “program promotion program” in the broadcasting has been realized until now.